Monday, 15 September 2014

Yeah, that's not a typo. I just made up a word. I suspect it will have limited value to humankind's ever growing dictionary, however. The Oxford people haven't replied to my letter, at any rate.

A long long time ago, I fantasised about Chaos Thug Horse. As best as I can recall, the first figures that were actually released as some sort of human light cavalry for chaos were as late as 6th edition - Thugs had stopped being and Marauders became what Thugs once were. Perhaps you remember the figures - this was when GW decided that Marauders were large, muscular, topless (with shaved and likely oiled chests) and wore tight trousers. All a bit YMCA, in my opinion. I think the cavalry were less over the top, by virtue of having horses, but I digress.

The point is, if you want Thug Horse, you'll have to make your own.

To my simple mind, the solution, therefore, was to use normal foot Thugs and put them on horses. I mean, duh! Right?

Hmmm...I'm not so sure. I believe the place I fell over on this one was that for whatever reason, most of my Thugs have a lot of armour. Curiously, those that would fit on horses are also carry the heaviest armour. It's almost like they knew the best way to get on a horse would be to have lots of armour.

So at this point, I was going to put pictures up to explain and then move onto some further commentary. But I see that I've stuffed up my picture numbering, so that I would have to work harder than any returned value to change that into anything like how I pictured this post.

And at the end of the day, I want you to see all the pictures, so I'm okay with that.

But, by way of explanation, when I was taking pictures of the Thurauders, I thought I'd position them with a small chaos army. Just chaos, this time - not the extra friends that I typically use. It is a small army, but beautifully proportioned, as some would say. And not any cheaper (points wise, if that's of interest to you) for it either.

Ultimately, everything else is self evident and warrants little explanation. We'll discuss the term Thurauder after the pictures...

Anyway, the army:

And then some closeups:

Actual close ups of the Thurauders:

The Thurauders are all mounted on Marauder metal chaos steeds - from what I can see, Marauder pretty much cloned the Citadel equivalents, but made them substantially smaller. I presume this was a cost thing, as the Citadel horses were colossal compared to the other mounts of the time. Below are some comparison shots of a Marauder and equivalent Citadel steed:

So, Thurauder. I'm hoping the term makes sense now, but essentially, right up until I had painted them, they looked like Thugs. Once painted, they looked a lot more like Marauder Horse. There was nothing 'light' about them as cavalry.

Now, of course, no one can argue they're not Chaos Thug horse - said troops can wear heavy armour. Once I've painted up the Citadel Chaos Warrior Horse, there will be quite a solid visual distinction between the two that I could capitalise on as I shift between Thug -> Marauder -> Warrior as I need to. Ultimately, I had planned to have the warriors on Juggernauts of Khorne as the Warrior Horse on Chaos Steeds, with the ones on steeds as the Marauders. Perhaps one day, when I get there, we can have the debate again. The point is, with the smaller horses, these guys are only likely to ever occupy the two lower slots...